If every U.S. state had the same population, what would the map of America look like.

Every state has one governor and two senators, but, in almost every other way, each state’s human geography is different, often wildly so. New Jersey has 15 times more people than Wyoming, despite being one-tenth its size. You can divide the island of Manhattan in two and the top half would be more populous than North Dakota, the bottom half more populous than South Dakota.

Most state borders were drawn centuries ago, long before the country was fully settled, and often the lines were drawn somewhat arbitrarily, to coincide with topography or latitude and longitude lines that today have little to do with population numbers. I wanted to know what the country might look like if we threw out all of the East’s ancient squiggles and the West’s rigid squares, and reconstituted the country as a union of states of equal population. Maybe it’s because I grew up in New Hampshire, one of the nation’s smallest states geographically and population-wise, but I’ve always been intrigued by the idea that we might find a way to even things out.

This is easier said than done. I started with a relatively straightforward approach to evening up the numbers: splitting America into just two states of equal population. Using the 2010 decennial census as my data source, I drew the map below. Each region has approximately 154,374,000 residents and no existing census tract is split in two.